By Jonathan Crow

I just did the math. I added up the workshops we are going to be doing during the Intalio User Conference and it turns out we will have over 16 hours of in depth training on everything from the newest features of Intalio|BPMS and what we are working on in the deep dark recesses of the Intalio|Labs, to performance tuning your Intalio|Server.

If you compare that with our 3 hour online training course, we are talking about training worth almost $2,000. And you get that with a regular attendee pass for only $500 - a savings of $1,500. Pretty great savings in and of itself, but throw on tips and best practices from the Intalio|Community, industry trends from keynote speakers, and well just hanging out with us and how can you resist?

For more information or to register please visit the Intalio User Conference website.

Add comment May 12th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

Hopefully by know you have heard that Intalio is hosting our first ever user conference on June 17-18 in San Francisco.

We have also organized a training session after the event, June 19-20 in Palo Alto. The great news is that now, users who sign up for the training by Friday May 16 also get a free pass to the user conference.

For details you can email sales@intalio.com, or contact us by phone at 650-596-1800 and press 3 for sales.

Add comment May 12th, 2008

By Arnaud Blandin

I am really proud to announce that ITCInfotech has decided to join the Intalio|Partner Network as well as Genoko.

ITCInfotech is our first partner in India. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Indian market, ITCInfotech is the IT arm of ITC, one of the largest company in Asia. Genoko has now signed on as a Silver partner in Singapore. They bring their expertise in Document Management systems and office processes built around the FujiXerox environment.

Both companies made their decisions after seeing the potential of our product and its maturity during our first training class in Singapore.

We really look forward extending our activities in APAC thanks to our partners. Several key projects are already in the pipeline, so it looks to be a promising year.

Add comment May 9th, 2008

By Sebastien Stadil

Our German friends will be interested in knowing that there is a Process Solutions Day in Frankfurt, on May 27th. Our trusted partner AncudIT has written an article on it.

We will be unveiling our Intalio|Business Process Platform (Intalio|BPP) there, too: "We are taking our BPMS solution to the next level, a Business Process Platform – creating an environment where enterprise applications can be tied together through process management enabling what I like to refer to as process driven applications." says Arnaud Blandin, our Business Development Director. "BPP goes beyond just integrating an ECM, ESB, IAM, Enterprise Portal, ERP and other mission critical applications. Intalio|BPP combines all those functions in one package and we provide support for all those applications. We have chosen Process Solution Day to unveil and demonstrate Intalio|BPP for the first time in Europe."

If you are interested, check out the complete agenda.

Add comment May 2nd, 2008

By Arnaud Blandin

A good friend of mine, Dr. Alexander Samarin gave a presentation at the Architecture and Process Conference last week in Washington DC.

The sildes, titled "Architecting Enterprise BPM Systems for Optimal Agility" are available below:


Particularly check out slides 17-18;).

But what I found very useful about this slide deck was the appreciation of how complex it is to build optimal agility throughout the enterprise. The good news, I am now paraphrasing, is that BPM can be done incrementally, is appreciated by the various stakeholders and all participants can, in effect, mark off their own territory in the sandbox.

Alexander already demonstrated it with several of our customers in Switzerland. He is also putting together a book explaining how to improve BPM systems with the help of Intalio|BPMS: "Improving business process management systems" (www.improving-BPM-systems.com)

1 comment May 1st, 2008

By Sebastien Stadil

Small update on our presence at the JavaOne conference announced here.

Come visit us at JavaOne for free, using the one-day pass print out.

We are located at booth 539 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Add comment April 30th, 2008

By Sebastien Stadil

Yours truly will be exhibiting at Sun's JavaOne Conference next week. Hurrah!

This is a great occasion to come see us in person, ask questions, and get product demos, as well as meet the members of the engineering team Alex Boisvert, Hugues Malphettes, and Matthieu Riou.

1 comment April 29th, 2008

By Sebastien Stadil

Registrations are now open for Intalio User Conference, the first conference to bring together Intalio Partners, customers, and users from all around the world.

Intalio User Conference will feature world class speakers such as Janelle Hill, Doug Neal, and Joe McKendrick. Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi will address Intalio's State of the Union as well.

The complete Agenda is currently being put together, and will be available shortly - we are all ears however, and are open for input from you. If you have a suggestion for a topic, speaker, or workshop, please email us at intalio-conf-08@intalio.com. What kind of sessions would you like to see?

Add comment April 28th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

We certainly hope that people judge us by the company we keep.

We just found out that one of our partners, Ancud IT won the Ingres Partner Excellence Award for best contribution to open source. The award was announced in Prague at the Ingres Partner Summit.

Ancud IT integrated the Ingres Open Source Database with Alfresco's Enterprise Content Management to create an enterprise portal. With some projects already in the pipeline things are looking good for them.

Congratulations!

Add comment April 22nd, 2008

By Jacques Alexandre-Gerber

Not to be outdone by Arnaud's post about the State of the Union for Intalio in EMEA and APAC, I thought I would let everyone know about what is going on with Intalio in my neck of the woods.

We trained 18 new people

Signed 2 new subscription customers: A major US government agency (can't say which yet) and IT Frontier

• The US government agency is in using BPM for a funds approval process.
• In Feb. we made an announcement about IT Frontier heading up our community in Japan. They continue to be a major driving factor in Japan for us.

Renewed 2 subscription customers: France Telecom (California) and DIP (formerly known as DLGPSR, in Australia)

• The R&D division of France Telecom in California is experimenting with BPM, tying in a SaaS front end to see what they can do with it. Who knows where this could lead in the broader FT worldwide.

Brought on 2 new partners: Borealis (Silver, Canada) and eVision (Platinum, Canada)

• Borealis develops a product for mining firms to manage everything around the preperation and management of a new mine, including the geological data used to determine optimal placement.
• We are working with eVision to organize our first training in Montreal next week

Renewed 2 partners: Modus21 (Gold, US) and SIG SA (Gold, Mexico)

• Modus21 is a business and technology consulting firm that specializes in Business Process Management and Systems Interoperability.

3 new OEM customers: ABIT (Croatia), NTT DATA Intramart (Japan) and Brickell Research (US)

• ABIT is an OEM customer of ours in Croatia that does builds an ECM for the banking industry
• NTT DATA Intramart (we just talked about in a press release this week) integrated Intalio into their Web platform
• Brickell Research is an OEM Customer based in Florida that sells solutions for small and medium Healthcare centers everywhere in the US.

Now on to 5.2 and Q2!

Add comment April 22nd, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

Tony Baer recently wrote an article entitled "Is SOA Getting Boring? Tony Baer's Report from IBM IMPACT" concluding that "From a technology standpoint, SOA might be getting a lot more boring. However, impacts to vendor business relationships are for now anything but."

I couldn't agree with him more. But, I am a marketing guy so I figured I should shut up about the technology being boring so as not to offend the developers, without whom I really have nothing to market;). But, now that someone else is saying it... yippee!

But the most important aspect of his comment is the last bit - what businesses are doing with SOA (and I would lump BPM in as well) is terribly exciting. And that is my job, right? Explaining to everyone whose eyes roll back in their heads when I say that I work for a BPM company (because to them BPM=Technology for technologists) what is so cool about BPM, in other words how it affects companies and the interesting ways companies are using it to make the world safe for democracy. Ok, well at least pretty darn interesting. So, look for more of those stories from me over the coming months. It is also the reason our CEO, Ismael Ghalimi, is sexing up BPM. Check out his article on "Process Discovery".

Add comment April 11th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

We've been here at the Gartner ITXpo Emerging Trends conference in Las Vegas this week. The show has been very well attended and exceeded my expectations. But, I wanted to take a moment out of our time pitching to attendees to talk about some of the conversations that are being had here.

First off, in one session Andy Kyte talked about why leaders place IT Strategy before Business Strategy. This is a conversation near and dear to to our hearts. What we have been preaching is better collaboration between the business and IT groups. And the fact is that we provide the tools to facilitate that collaboration - a single tool that can be used by both to build and deploy processes.

Andy Kyte talked mostly about IT assets and how decisions are made within the organization to spend money on IT resources. But I found a lot of what he was saying applies to how decisions are made within the organization about Business Processes.

Some very provocative and interesting comments (and humorous, he really was quite entertaining):

It is exceptional to find people at the top of the org chart who are leaders.

The cultural myth is that bad cheese is the starting point for good strategy (leader gets up in the middle of the night because of the bad cheese and the muse gives him/her the inspiration to build the strategy). Moses comes down from the mountain to bring strategy to the masses. Obviously it doesn't happen in the real world.

Waiting for the business strategy doesn't work, but going on with IT strategy in the lead doesn't work either.

So, what do you do? We need a new vision for how IT and Business leaders collaborate. There is an assumption by the Business world of how agile the IT world is, and how fast the technology can change to match what the vision is. The gap between the assumption and reality is what kills us. While Kyte was discussing, in the main asset planning, we find this equally true in the BPM space. In traditional BPM tools when the tech staff develops the process, because they are using different tools than the ones used by the business analyst, there is a disconnect. When the process is developed in Intalio both groups use the same tool. We have seen cases when the techie went to the business user and showed where the the process was defined, and where there is a break in the process because, for example, the data is not there to support the process. So, instead of showing the underlying gobbledygook code the business user sees the graphical tool for mapping data and can clearly understand the disconnect.

Businesses go through customization and integration for applications that are about to go through upgrades, all because of the budget cycle. We in the business community are very bad at terminating bad applications. The equivalent in the business process world is how processes are defined, written in stone, transformed into code for execution and locked into deployment. What is needed is flexibility in being able to design and deploy on the fly (hmm, how coincidental is it that we do that?).

There is a need to create a well defined knowledge base used to support the decision making processes a living strategy that informs the realities of the business vision and where we are in relationship to the vision and is continuously revised. A longer term view gives us a better understanding what is possible and what is desired and limits the gap between the two. Create a shorthand notation which is digestible by all not something pulled out once a year that is monolithic. In the BPM space there can be a huge disconnect between the business users and the IT analysts. Having people work within the same tools gives each group visibility into what is desired and what is possible. Within our modeling tool we give ability to annotate the various steps within a process, or even attach documents. This allows both camps to build a common language, in essence a living knowledge base of the process that can be easily modified.

There is conflict between stakeholders. There is nothing wrong with conflict. There is everything wrong with undocumented conflict. Understand the wants demand and needs of the stakeholders, but also understand that it is impossible to fully satisfy everyone. We should follow the Japanese model of arguing before the decision and agreeing after the decision is made, instead of the model here of letting one side dominate and ignoring the decision after. Well, not sure how to rectify the cultural aspects in a BPM tool;) but good advice.

So what have you seen? Is there a disconnect between Bus. and IT in your organization? How have you handled it? Are there ways we could better address the issue?

Look for more discussions at Gartner ITXpo on the blog tomorrow.

Add comment April 9th, 2008

By Sebastien Stadil

We received the following comment from David French:

An organization using this as a production solution will need to consider its exposure to

• failure in the cloud removing access to fundamental business process engine and related dashboard information
• privacy and security of data passing through a commercial computing host in a jurisdiction that may not have the same legislative protections as your business domicile

On point 1:
The Intalio|On Demand servers are no more vulnerable than local servers. Better yet, since they are maintained by people who know the server and product in gory details, the chance of failure is likely less. In that event, however, we guarantee one (1) business day response time. In most cases, the response time is under 1 hour. As for backups, the data is backed up every minute for the past hour, every hour for the past day, and every day for the past month.

On point 2:
This is a concern to all that do business over the Internet, and if you do not trust established security protocols like https, ssh, and virtual private networks, or disagree with US Legislation, than we recommend you use our on premise version to install locally.

1 comment April 4th, 2008

By Arnaud Blandin

While I was preparing the report for our Q1 activities in EMEA and APAC, I realized that a lot happened in the course of the last 3 months. So, I wanted to take a moment and highlight some of the key events for our Intalio community.

Trainings
Since January, we trained 44 new users on Intalio|BPMS. What is even more astounding is that all of our scheduled training sessions are still fully booked. What we have been doing in our training sessions has proved to be a very efficient way to get people understanding our concepts and our platform.

Customers
We recently signed 4 new customers:

• The City of Den Haag (in the Netherlands) will be evaluating the product with our support. They are working on a prototype that will help manage some online services for their citizen. The project should be completed by September.
• Eurobank EFG is evaluating Intalio|BPMS Enterprise Edition over the next 3 months in order to determine how it can be best used in building core processes. "We selected to run a Proof of Concept with Intalio since we consider its BPMS offering to be the only credible open source alternative that features such a high level of adherence to standards for process design, deployment and execution." mentioned Livas Dimitrios, Director of Multichannel Applications & Integration Technologies.
• Thames Valley University is using our product for a Research and Development project that aims at improving the University teaching program definition.
• SmartInternet in Australia. This one is the first of what I am sure will be a long list of customers signed by our Platinum partner OpenSoft.

Partners
We continue to expand our partner network in China and the addition of Altendis in France and . More importantly, 2 of our good partners (Shimo IT and Wego) have decided to renew their subscription as they see great potential this year.

Regional Projects
Finally, it’s worth noting that we are up and running with training and offices in Asia. We have already had 2 training sessions and met several interesting people (hint hint, ahem partners, cough customers). The TAS3 project in Europe is now officially started and Alex Boisvert (Product Development Director for Intalio|Server) will meet the key technical resources on April 15th to define our scope of work.

In all these different customer wins, BAM was a key component to securing the customers.

With the launch of the Enterprise Edition I expect Q2 to be even more interesting.

1 comment April 4th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

We are excited to announce that we just signed up the Pentagon to deploy Intalio|On Demand to track and monitor alien sightings. This is the first customer, of what we hope will be many, for our recently launched product. The agreement is a multi-year deal stretching well into 2040 when the Pentagon expects that the BPM project entitled “Operation Alien Cover-up” will be completed.

The aim of the project is to track UFO sightings around the US and make sure that in each documented case where aliens have been seen there is a compelling and plausible story to deny the event.

The BPM project is kicked off (the Start Event) by a query to the databases of the National Enquirer with search terms, such as “alien love child”, “three-headed Martian”, and “alien death-ray”. When one of the search terms is found it automatically generates messages sent to Air Force commanders throughout the US and especially in Area 54.

A mash-up with Google Maps creates a seamless picture of the sightings in a given area, finds nearby crop-circles and triangulates with all existing pyramids. According to the Pentagon this gives an accurate reading of the velocity, direction, and location of origin of the sighted craft. Further mash-ups are planned for Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to crawl those sites for possible leads. The Pentagon has also negotiated a contract to bundle all hardware shipped from Alienware with SOA components to control NASA's Mars Rovers should the need for remote defense become necessary (Intalio developed the Castor project used in the Mars Rover).

Marvin, the project lead, stated “we are excited about putting this into place. It will speed up deployment of MIB officials to site areas by at least 50%.” Marvin has been able to work alongside his human counterparts for years due to the controversial Martian Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.

Wookipedia defines the term alien as a "Humanocentric biological, and sometimes political term to describe a sentient species or a person of a species other than a Human or near-Human. The term may have been derived from the first impression of early Humans, when they had their first contacts with species from other planets. However, it seems to have been prevalent even in subsequent millennia." "Working with the Pentagon has been an amazing experience," commented Ismael Ghalimi, founder and CEO of Intalio. "They even let me play with their ray guns. They make a cool pzzht sound."

Happy April Fool's Day everyone, and may the force be with you. Should the need arise, here is an article that helps you tell if co-workers are aliens.

3 comments April 1st, 2008

By Rick Geneva

Tomorrow I will be at Linux/Open Source on Wall Street. It looks like fun times, with speakers such as Raven Zachary of The 451 Group, Matt Asay, GM Americas for Alfresco (a recent integration partner), executives from CSI, Novell, Intel, Oracle, and the A-Team.

I will be in New York for an Intalio training session I am running, and thought it would be a great opportunity to attend.

Personally I am interested in meeting Head Bubba the Vice President of IT Research and Development at Credit Suisse. The side burns alone...

Let me know if you are going to be there, you can connect with me over LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickgeneva or at geneva@intalio.com.

Add comment March 31st, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

We recently signed a rather large OEM partner that necessitated us going through testing and certification on a wide range of platforms - 300 combinations of platforms to be exact between the Operating System, hardware, application server, and database.

Because of the time requirements we needed to get it done fast. So, we turned to GlobalLogic to help us out. The announcement went out earlier today, and I just wanted to add my little bit about working with GlobalLogic. They have a great staff with experience coming out of their ears. They also have a great reputation of delivering quickly, which was a must in this situation. We look forward to continued succesful engagements.

Just in case you want to do the math - here is what GlobalLogic is going to help us certify:

Supported Operating Systems	Supported Databases	Supported Hardware Platforms	Support Application Servers
Windows 2003 Server, 2000 Server	Oracle	Intel – x86, Itanium	Apache Geronimo
Red Hat Linux	MS SQL	IBM Power	Apache Tomcat
SUSE Linux	MySQL Enterprise	HP-PA Risc 32 and 64 bit	JBoss Application Server
HP-UX	IBM DB2	Opteron EM64	IBM Websphere
IBM AIX	Sybase	Sun Sparc 32 and 64 bit
Sun Solaris	PostgreSQL

Add comment March 28th, 2008

By Arnaud Blandin

As we are expanding our activities in China, I am really pleased to announce that FirstTech is joining our Partner Network as a Silver partner. FirstTech has implemented many successful SOA projects in the Semiconductor industry as well as the Finance industry.

”We found Intalio to be one critical key stone in our full SOA solution suite, Intalio|BPMS has proven features, high performance and fulfill open standards in the Industry. We want to develop strong partnership with Intalio to generate strong business together in SOA field".
--- Winston Wang, CEO

Add comment March 25th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

In a recent article Stephanie Olsen discussed the use of Open Source Software (OSS) as a guerrilla marketing tool. She quoted our CEO, Ismael Ghalimi from his talk yesterday at SDForum as saying "Two-thirds of our leads come from Google, and more than half come from the search term 'open source'." She goes on to tout the benefits of Open Source communities, and other aspects of how OSS has contributed to getting the word out.

For us it goes even further, beyond being a good marketing tool it helps us create a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates a virtuous cycle where:

1. The customer downloads the product.
2. The customer plays with it and decides s/he needs training.
3. After receiving the training from us they decide they need to upgrade to the Enterprise version.

Now obviously there are times when people fall off the path, they don't need training, or to upgrade. But after users go through training we have a qualified customer who knows how to use the product. In the end you have all the building blocks for success.

Add comment March 25th, 2008

By Jonathan Crow

Ok, aside from the fact that such a thing doesn't exist, Bruce Silver paid our CEO and founder, Ismael Ghalimi, a pretty huge compliment by suggesting that if a BPM Hall of Fame did exist that Ismael should be on the first slate of inductees. My favorite quote from the article:

Ismael Ghalimi is responsible for many of the things that today define what BPM actually is – a technology based on Internet and web services standards, and, more important, a technology that empowers business to take charge of their own processes.

Now since the star already exist on another walk of fame, how about some suggestions for what the symbol should be for the BPM Hall of Fame. I would suggest, maybe the Gateway Databased Inclusive symbol?

Add comment March 24th, 2008